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Filed Under: recent-phds

Cameron Foltz

Cameron Foltz

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: c.foltz@columbia.edu

Cameron Foltz is a PhD candidate specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan history. He is broadly interested in territoriality, migration, ethnicity, and governance in China’s western frontiers. 

His dissertation project draws on Chinese and Tibetan sources to demonstrate that an international wool boom (c. 1880–1930) driven by US carpet production profoundly reshaped the political geography of what would become Qinghai Province (f. 1928) in northwest China. Tibetan pastoralists, who supplied much of the wool, were enriched enough to build community monasteries to territorialize lands that they seized from Mongol communities. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, this lucrative trade soon drew the attention of the Hui Muslim military rulers in Xining who sought to monopolize its profits and incorporate disparate communities into the new province. His second project focuses on decollectivization among pastoralists in Qinghai Province.

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Filed Under: recent-phds

Hyoseak (Stephen) Choi

Hyoseak (Stephen) Choi

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Email: hc2963@columbia.edu

Stephen focuses on the notion of childhood and its role in the development of modern Japanese literature and culture. His dissertation project looks at how the modern notion of childhood and its various iterations (shōnen, shōjo, jidō, etc.) initiated the creation of new spaces in publishing, which are interwoven with ideas about social development, nation, education, as well as art. He is also utilizing his Korean background to include colonial systems of children’s writing and suggest a rethinking of colonial subjectivities and agencies through the voice of children. Before joining Columbia, he received an MA degree from the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto. He writes fiction in both English and Japanese and also has an avid interest in cinema and visual storytelling, with experience studying filmmaking at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

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Xuexin Cai

Xuexin Cai

Field: Chinese and Environmental History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Year of Enrollment: 2020
Email: xc2546@columbia.edu

Xuexin Cai is a PhD candidate in the History-East Asia Program. He works at the intersection of environmental humanities, borderlands studies, and the history of science and technology. While his current research focuses on Yunnan, in Southwest China, he is also interested in the broader Sino-Southeast Asian and Sino-Tibetan borderlands.

His dissertation, titled “Between Wasteland and Wilderness: Rubber, Nature, and the Making of Tropical China, 1945-2000,” explores the socio-environmental history of Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), which sits at the intersection of China, Laos, and Burma, and is one of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and critical use of scientific studies and digital geospatial mapping, his dissertation traces two intertwined historical processes in the half century following the end of WWII: the biophysical, socioeconomic, and discursive transformation of southern Yunnan (particularly Xishuangbanna) from a remote borderland into the center of China’s tropical sciences and agriculture, and China’s transformation into a state with serious commitment to environmentally sustainable development. Focusing on China’s coterminous establishment of rubber farms and nature reserves, this project explores questions that are key to understanding the environmental changes and the lived experience of millions of people in southern Yunnan and beyond, from the Maoist to the Reform periods.

Experiences before coming to Columbia have shaped Xuexin’s current research interests. During his undergraduate years at New York University Abu Dhabi, he studied the history of tea trade between communities in Southwest China and those on the Tibetan Plateau. Upon graduation, he went to Yunnan and spent three years there, working first in the public humanities and then at a village primary school not far from the China-Burma border. The people and places that he became familiar with during those years continue to be an important source of inspiration for his current research.

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